If you're the central government, China is really one big computer game.
It took me a while to come to this conclusion, which is surprising because it's so obvious.
Remember back when SimCity, that choose-your-own-adventure meets urban planning computer game, was popular?
You could spend hours on end building your ideal city, then flip the switch and see what happened when your hapless citizens went along with their daily lives. You could change things and react to crises as they came along. It was the one of the greatest digital power trips a 10-year-old could want.
Click. Eighteen new (and alarmingly empty) skyscrapers in your downtown core!
Click. Bulldoze those houses to make way for a massive stadium shaped like a bird's nest!
Click. A Magnetic Levitation transit line from an airport all the way to the capital of the next province over!
Uh oh, the locals are protesting--do you bring in the riot police or bow to their demands (or, the increasingly popular Option C: Both)?
Starting to sound familiar?
It's widely accepted that a significant part of the credit for China's surreal development over the past 30 years is due to its government's ability to do, um, pretty much whatever it wants. Without pesky elections or political parties to worry about (or at least none of any genuine significance), the government can ensure everything will go according to plan as it blitzes this billion-person country to a global powerhouse and third-largest economy in the world (sucks to be you, Germany).
The catch, of course, is that issuing no-nonsense legislative demands is a lot easier than enacting said edicts when your domain is friggin' enormous and your bureaucracy nowhere near as centralized as you pretend it is. Sure, you can declare that Shaoxing will be the tie capital of the world and Pudong New Area will be divided into four industry-specific economic zones. But it's damn hard to enforce little things like, I dunno, food-safety laws and labour regulations in Dalian, Baoshan and Kashgar--and everywhere in between.
To make things even worse, residents' reactions to your well-meaning clicks are becoming increasingly unpredictable and harder to manage. It's no longer as easy to delete people, or to cut-and-paste them to some more convenient location. And people keep looking over your shoulder, pointing out minor things you really weren't going to bother about or the way you deal with your denizens.
What's a gamer to do?
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